In less than a year you digested
a Puerto Rican baseball player,
certified horse inseminator,
disc  jockey, your sister’s
father-in-law,  a woman
named  Genevieve
                 and me.

Not much left after the pan
is boiled dry; memories,
residue and grit.

You tied  shoelaces together
and tried to hang yourself
from McMillin’s
basketball
hoop.

The neighbors talked about
it for years over flapjacks
and grits.  

They couldn’t understand why
anyone would attempt
suicide. I knew
the reason;

you were homely
and dull, kind of
foul smelling

too.  You failed
at  death, me
at life.

After  many years in the basement,
behind a green tattersall shirt,
next to a plum colored robe,
is my gray tweed sports jacket;
sadly hanging like an old man’s *******,

inside the left breast pocket rests
the funeral  program of a man
I have learned not to hate,
or to become a semblance,
and god ******, I have not;
I still have time remaining.

"War - I know it well, and the butchery of men...*

A few old men don't forget.
Each generation passes away.
Millions of young men
swarmed the rice paddies,
struggled up the mountains,
destined to be butchered,
****** and forgotten.
This generation passes away.
The world sings its songs
and time passes as it must.
But for just a while yet,
a few old men can't forget.

Tempus pro nemine manet*

It's the day there comes
a knock on the door
and you open it to find
a government agent
with a glowing, hot iron.

You drop your drawers
and OLD is eternally
branded on your ***.

It is painful, sad,
absurd and funny.

Sweet relief, too.

Never again must you
worry about getting old
or dying young.

You are old. It is official.

From now on there is
only older and older
until there isn't

and then the mystery.

Merrily, merrily,
merrily, merrily,
life and death,
but the same dream.

The nervous afflictions
of poets drive
doctors to dismay;
it is difficult
and dangerous
to diagnose
a chameleon
in a thorn bush.

Integrity:

All these decades
thirsting in the wilderness
and still he refuses
to drink the kool-aid.

Delight:

He has lived alone
so long that
he has learned
to hug himself
and enjoy it.

Where is the illness
in either?

the brilliant morning
no longer invites

every TV show
is a rerun

books that screamed
now murmur

even the body
speaks in the past tense

now becomes was

the falling away
of self
into shadow

even when time
falls and freezes
like winter leaves

the urge to consciousness
resists surrender

how we long for
bright new moments

right to the brink
of nightfall

even as the white flag of death

slowly unfurls

Most folks
live in small yards,
their vision
curtailed by walls;
eventually the walls
become reality.

This is also
known as death.

There is a world
beyond the
one
seen on
television screens,
outside the realm
of suicides &
wall to wall 
crimes
where
flocks of
birds are migrating
South in search
of sun &
deer run
across forests
not yet discovered
by anyone  
& though I may
not see it daily it is
this distant world
that saves
me.